I read this article today, and I'm interested in the thoughts of the 365 community on this subject.
This is something that I've also been questioning myself. I've recently been experimenting with a Kodak Brownie that's been in the family since the 50's. Other than the process of actually getting the film developed (which is an exercise in itself!) I was struck by how differently I needed to approach the photographs I was taking. Instead of thousands of potential images I could capture without a thought, I was limited to nine, which has made me much more critical of what I'm capturing (that and the cost). My ability to edit these photographs is also limited. The whole exercise though I believe has been beneficial; I'm even ending up with some pictures I use!
I agree with what you're saying. I recently got Lightroom and when I was importing my photos I decided to have a bit of a clear out of those that there was no real need to keep. I try and get my favourites printed out now and again and hang them in my apartment and I have a digital frame but a huge number of my pictures are taken and then not looked at.
Since I bought a DSLR, I've been trying to be more ruthless about just deleting photos that I won't go back to (or where I have many similar shots from trying different settings). I like the fact that learning and experimenting is made much easier by digital photography. I probably wouldn't have got a DSLR if we still used film because I wouldn't have been confident that the developed film would have anything usable.
For me, the concern is more about whether we are now so fixated on documenting experiences (with photos we never look at) than actually experiencing them. I'm as guilty of it as anyone - so busy trying to capture a concert or sports event that I miss what's actually going on or don't pay enough attention to it. It's something that I've been trying to be more conscious of lately and find a balance so that I have photos to help capture events and jog my memory, but actually just live in the moment too. I was at a football match recently and the people in front of me were so busy taking photos and posing that they watched about 10 minutes of the game in total and missed both goals. Maybe they just weren't fans, but I did find it strange.
Anyway, that's my tuppence-worth! Thanks for posting the link, interesting article.
@caseyrybeck Very interesting article and it's a worry to historians that there will be a photographic black hole in years to come as all these billions of photo files sitting on digital devices disappear. It is still possible to print from a glass plate negative made 150 years ago which means that analogue media is more likely to survive in the future, this is why I try to take at least one roll of film (normally 35mm) per week as well as my 100s of digital photos. In fact I seem to have stepped back at least 15 years with my photography as I now often go out with 2 cameras like I used too, the difference being that they are now 35mm and a DSLR as opposed to slide and B&W emulsions which I would have taken out in the 1980s and 90s. If I go out to photograph an event I try to immerse myself in what is going on and that hopefully improves the photos I take. I agree to many people live their lives through one screen or another but I suppose that is their choice. Mine is to enjoy life in every way I can and if possible to record it on film for future generations to enjoy.
@clearday Totally agree with your comment about being so fixated on documenting everything that we don't actually experience it anymore. This came home to me recently while I was watching a seminar on wedding photography and it occurred to me that the focus was much more on making romantic pictures or making a stunning video than it was on the fact that they were getting married. And I don't just mean the focus of the photographer, which is to be expected, but that of the couple themselves, who often seem more concerned with getting the shots than with making the commitment or sharing the experience with friends and family.
For myself I try to distinguish between going out to take photos, and going to an event where I might snap a few pictures. That might explain why I have so few pictures of family and friends. I hate ruining an enjoyable occasion by always worrying about the lighting, the equipment etc. and I also hate being that person who interrupts the event with fequent requests to 'smile', 'look this way', etc. etc.
I am not sure that it is all that different today. My wife and I are going through literally thousands of photo's taken with various film cameras that we have owned. I take my camera almost everywhere with me, but am able to enjoy events as well as take photo's to document it. Part of the perception that things are so different is the ubiquitous cell phone camera which is used, I believe, mainly as a tool for communicating with others. Most of the over the top photography is actually part of real time social sharing with absent friends. That is a different phenomenon that has to do with mobility and connectedness. It is how Younger people communicate. My son hardly every talks on the phone like we did. It is all mixed media instant messaging for him.
I do agree that I take more pictures with my DSLR because I don't have to pay for film and I can throw out the ones that don't turn out so well with no regrets, but I don't think I keep and look at at any more or less photo's than I did with film.
Yeah...I used to take way too many pictures when I used film, as well, so the advent of digital didn't really change that for me. I take a lot more, but I'm also a lot more interested in this hobby than I was twenty years ago.
I do have to make a conscious effort to have things printed, though, and I do worry that my multiple layers of backups will fail and someday my kids will be looking for baby pictures to compare to their children's baby pictures and there won't be any. My husband and I were walking through galleries of portraits discussing whether there would be anything like this of people who are living now, in three or four hundred years, or just framed SD cards with little signs that said who owned them and how many pictures were kept on them.
I agree that the cell phone camera and instant sharing has changed photography and communication, though. Two weeks ago I took my first kid-free vacation in more than a decade (so, it's been a while since I did tourist-y things where there'd be people with cameras) and found that my old strategy of "find someone with more expensive gear and ask them to take a picture of us" was next to impossible - nearly everyone was toting around selfie sticks and cell phones. Some of my friends were actually a bit peeved that I wasn't posting photos in real time on Instagram or Facebook. "On vacation" used to mean "unavailable". Not anymore!
I also noticed how many people were basically "experiencing" museums and such seemingly exclusively through their cell phones, instead of just with their eyes, and that also saddened me a bit, although I couldn't exactly say why. I did take pictures of things that interested me in museums, but not as a substitute for studying things in the present, if that makes sense?
Yep, much to agree with here. But I think ultimately "documenting" and "looking" aren't in opposition to one other. The best photographers are the ones who "look" the most carefully. What we need to avoid is "blind" documentation - the kind I suspect you witnessed at the football match.
I'm a great fan of initiatives like SOOC shooting or shooting film. They offer learning opportunities because they slow the photographer down. As they do so, they make us compose more carefully in-camera and therefore "look" more carefully as we shoot.
I sometimes wonder whether 365 couldn't incentivize us to look more carefully at each other's photos. Alongside our feed of photos could it show our feed of comments? That might encourage more thoughtful observations than "great capture" and be a good way of pointing people to photos that deserve attention. ("Great capture" and comments like it are like a polite ripple of applause. Pretty worthless but I confess I've made them many times myself.)
I was just thinking about this yesterday. I went to my very first show ever and at the last minute decided to leave my only camera (point and shoot) behind. I was terrified of getting into trouble or something for trying to bring a camera into a night club where some decently big bands were playing. As soon as we stepped inside someone was blatantly recording on a P&S camera, not trying to hide it at all. Later on I even spotted someone with a DSLR. Needless to say I was pretty furious with myself!
I tried to let it go as best I could but I definitely missed a few great shots and that bugged me. But the longer the show went the more screens I saw and the more that started to bug me instead. Multiple people spent the entire show standing 3 feet at the very most from the stage with an iPhone or a camera covering their face as they recorded. They didn't even try to keep the camera straight and one of them purposely moved their arms around to shake the camera in specific weird ways that would make it nauseating to watch (they obviously weren't dancing). And this is Idaho. The club wasn't that big and the crowd was small for most of the night. It was a pretty intimate show and views from everywhere were great until the very last band when the bar emptied onto the floor.
All of these people spent $30-40 to get in and hours a few feet away from bands (who all put on an excellent performance) but they never even watched. None of those videos would be worth watching later and some would be literally unwatchable because they were so shaky. It really just made me wonder what the point is. I don't have a cellphone, Twitter, or Instagram and barely post on Facebook so maybe I just can't understand it but it really just seems so pointless.
Anyways, before I started my project on January 1st (and even on the 1st) I took way too many photos. I'd average a couple sessions a month of around 100-400+ photos. Even editing as fast as I could using Actions I'd spend days working through the backlog. I looked at my photos from time to time. Once I started my sessions got drastically shorter very quickly and now I'm down to 5-15 on average, often 5 or less. Anything above 20-30 starts to feel like an impossible chore very fast and counts of 100+ leave me with a day or two of meh daily photos because I'm just exhausted from editing. I look at my own work a lot more now too. Its fascinating to see how I'm evolving and staying the same over the course of the project. Its nice to scroll through my Facebook album and see when specific things happened or what I liked on certain days.
On the other hand, any sort of trip or vacation is still a 24/7 shooting marathon. But once I've been somewhere a couple times I get downright brutal with what I delete. The folder for my first trip to Yellowstone is full of blurry bison photos and the 9th only has the best quality (or most interesting) saved. I know I'm going to have to delete every single shot I take out the window while the car is moving at a decent speed but I keep doing it, literally 100+ shots per trip straight to the trash. I guess its a way to entertain myself? Maybe its similar for other people who never seem to put their phone down but they just post more photos than I do?
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Since I bought a DSLR, I've been trying to be more ruthless about just deleting photos that I won't go back to (or where I have many similar shots from trying different settings). I like the fact that learning and experimenting is made much easier by digital photography. I probably wouldn't have got a DSLR if we still used film because I wouldn't have been confident that the developed film would have anything usable.
For me, the concern is more about whether we are now so fixated on documenting experiences (with photos we never look at) than actually experiencing them. I'm as guilty of it as anyone - so busy trying to capture a concert or sports event that I miss what's actually going on or don't pay enough attention to it. It's something that I've been trying to be more conscious of lately and find a balance so that I have photos to help capture events and jog my memory, but actually just live in the moment too. I was at a football match recently and the people in front of me were so busy taking photos and posing that they watched about 10 minutes of the game in total and missed both goals. Maybe they just weren't fans, but I did find it strange.
Anyway, that's my tuppence-worth! Thanks for posting the link, interesting article.
For myself I try to distinguish between going out to take photos, and going to an event where I might snap a few pictures. That might explain why I have so few pictures of family and friends. I hate ruining an enjoyable occasion by always worrying about the lighting, the equipment etc. and I also hate being that person who interrupts the event with fequent requests to 'smile', 'look this way', etc. etc.
I do agree that I take more pictures with my DSLR because I don't have to pay for film and I can throw out the ones that don't turn out so well with no regrets, but I don't think I keep and look at at any more or less photo's than I did with film.
I do have to make a conscious effort to have things printed, though, and I do worry that my multiple layers of backups will fail and someday my kids will be looking for baby pictures to compare to their children's baby pictures and there won't be any. My husband and I were walking through galleries of portraits discussing whether there would be anything like this of people who are living now, in three or four hundred years, or just framed SD cards with little signs that said who owned them and how many pictures were kept on them.
I agree that the cell phone camera and instant sharing has changed photography and communication, though. Two weeks ago I took my first kid-free vacation in more than a decade (so, it's been a while since I did tourist-y things where there'd be people with cameras) and found that my old strategy of "find someone with more expensive gear and ask them to take a picture of us" was next to impossible - nearly everyone was toting around selfie sticks and cell phones. Some of my friends were actually a bit peeved that I wasn't posting photos in real time on Instagram or Facebook. "On vacation" used to mean "unavailable". Not anymore!
I also noticed how many people were basically "experiencing" museums and such seemingly exclusively through their cell phones, instead of just with their eyes, and that also saddened me a bit, although I couldn't exactly say why. I did take pictures of things that interested me in museums, but not as a substitute for studying things in the present, if that makes sense?
I'm a great fan of initiatives like SOOC shooting or shooting film. They offer learning opportunities because they slow the photographer down. As they do so, they make us compose more carefully in-camera and therefore "look" more carefully as we shoot.
I sometimes wonder whether 365 couldn't incentivize us to look more carefully at each other's photos. Alongside our feed of photos could it show our feed of comments? That might encourage more thoughtful observations than "great capture" and be a good way of pointing people to photos that deserve attention. ("Great capture" and comments like it are like a polite ripple of applause. Pretty worthless but I confess I've made them many times myself.)
I tried to let it go as best I could but I definitely missed a few great shots and that bugged me. But the longer the show went the more screens I saw and the more that started to bug me instead. Multiple people spent the entire show standing 3 feet at the very most from the stage with an iPhone or a camera covering their face as they recorded. They didn't even try to keep the camera straight and one of them purposely moved their arms around to shake the camera in specific weird ways that would make it nauseating to watch (they obviously weren't dancing). And this is Idaho. The club wasn't that big and the crowd was small for most of the night. It was a pretty intimate show and views from everywhere were great until the very last band when the bar emptied onto the floor.
All of these people spent $30-40 to get in and hours a few feet away from bands (who all put on an excellent performance) but they never even watched. None of those videos would be worth watching later and some would be literally unwatchable because they were so shaky. It really just made me wonder what the point is. I don't have a cellphone, Twitter, or Instagram and barely post on Facebook so maybe I just can't understand it but it really just seems so pointless.
Anyways, before I started my project on January 1st (and even on the 1st) I took way too many photos. I'd average a couple sessions a month of around 100-400+ photos. Even editing as fast as I could using Actions I'd spend days working through the backlog. I looked at my photos from time to time. Once I started my sessions got drastically shorter very quickly and now I'm down to 5-15 on average, often 5 or less. Anything above 20-30 starts to feel like an impossible chore very fast and counts of 100+ leave me with a day or two of meh daily photos because I'm just exhausted from editing. I look at my own work a lot more now too. Its fascinating to see how I'm evolving and staying the same over the course of the project. Its nice to scroll through my Facebook album and see when specific things happened or what I liked on certain days.
On the other hand, any sort of trip or vacation is still a 24/7 shooting marathon. But once I've been somewhere a couple times I get downright brutal with what I delete. The folder for my first trip to Yellowstone is full of blurry bison photos and the 9th only has the best quality (or most interesting) saved. I know I'm going to have to delete every single shot I take out the window while the car is moving at a decent speed but I keep doing it, literally 100+ shots per trip straight to the trash. I guess its a way to entertain myself? Maybe its similar for other people who never seem to put their phone down but they just post more photos than I do?